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Surveillance is nothing new: Blogger and activist Ahmed Mansoor’s laptop is taken over by powerful spyware, Dubai, 25 September 2012
Bloomberg
Welectronic We were on the eight-lane highway from Abu Dhabi, the wealthy, conservative capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to the more liberal city of Dubai, a tourist hotspot and center of international trade, when the taxi driver’s phone rang. Then mine went off too: it was an accident alarm. None of us signed up for the service. We had been monitoring but the accident happened in the opposite lane. The alert is an example of ongoing digital monitoring, said to be for the convenience and peace of mind of UAE residents.
The UAE is the world’s largest consumer of mobile data, with an average of 18GB per person per month. “Digital technology has become very woven into the lives of Emiratis,” said James Shires, a cybersecurity expert at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “They are fascinated by modernity and portray themselves as technology leaders, bragging about their smart cities and the digital aspects of everyday life. Facilitation. But the other side of the coin is that everything is tracked and collected. Emiratis know this, but some see it as a necessary evil for a country facing so many geopolitical threats.
“Digitalization increases security while boosting economic development,” says Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist. “In this situation, many people are ready to compromise their right to privacy.” 10% of them are Emirati, 30% are other Arab or Iranian, 50% are Southeast Asian and 10% are Western. “Emiratis are a minority in their own country,” said Andreas Krieger, a security expert at King’s College London. “Surveillance technology makes them ubiquitous.”
Everyone I’ve talked to recognizes that mass surveillance violates free speech. Many people prefer to discuss sensitive topics face-to-face rather than over the phone. “We assume — or rather, we know — that we are constantly being watched and that it is dangerous to say anything politically(…)
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(2) Simmons & Simmons, “In Brief: Telecommunications Regulation in the United Arab Emirates,” Lexology, June 24
(4) See “Big Data Against Terrorism” by David Lyon and David Murakami Wood, Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Case of Canada, University of British Columbia Press, 2020.
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